I updated siduction and arch today. Arch, after updating, 3.1.7-1 kernel. Siduction after updating, 3.2.0. So siduction updates their kernel EVEN FASTER than arch!! That REALLY shocked me that they're ahead of Arch.

I updated siduction and arch today. Arch, after updating, 3.1.7-1 kernel. Siduction after updating, 3.2.0. So siduction updates their kernel EVEN FASTER than arch!! That REALLY shocked me that they're ahead of Arch.

Cool! I may have to get siduction and at least put it on the Lenovo upstairs in the Den.

I updated siduction and arch today. Arch, after updating, 3.1.7-1 kernel. Siduction after updating, 3.2.0. So siduction updates their kernel EVEN FASTER than arch!! That REALLY shocked me that they're ahead of Arch.

Cool! I may have to get siduction and at least put it on the Lenovo upstairs in the Den.

Since someone woke up this thread - (and has been "reported"), I thought that I'd revisit these comments because there are two similar distributions with updates this week, and both distributions have innovative ideas, but less than optimal testing and deployment, leading to a variation in the quality. Sometimes it's pretty good, and it's interesting stuff, but it's inconsistent.

They are:

Sabayon 16.05 and Manjaro Linux 16.06.

Manjaro Linux was announced on DistroWatch yesterday, 06-06-2016.

Sabayon Linux 16.05 was reviewed on DistroWatch Weekly yesterday.

My findings with Sabayon, to a certain degree, agree with what Jesse Smith found in his review: there is plenty of good stuff in Sabayon. The idea is good: take some of the massive software that's available in the source code based Gentoo Linux and build it, and also provide the capability to build or rebuild (and optimize or modify the code yourself). That makes a lot of code available and gives you a (relatively) fast way to build your own system initially from binary code, yet update whatever you want (if anything) easily from source code. That's the good idea and it is a good one.

The problem is that some of the infrastructure gets tested regularly and often, but other parts, not so much. The result is an inconsistent experience - you never know when something's going to work or when it's going to fail.

Manjaro Linux is perhaps even more volatile in this regard. Like the Sabayon <--> Gentoo synergy, Manjaro has a similar relationship to Arch, which in turn, takes a somewhat different tactic, but also has similarities to Gentoo, but it not built from that base; Arch uses it's own base, and Manjaro is built from it.

I'm not sure if it is the collection of AUR packages (community-based bleeding edge source code) for Arch (and Manjaro), if Manjaro has a limited number of testers, or what it is, but Manjaro might work for a while from the latest image, then badly fail a week or a month later when a package update breaks something, or it may not work at all. I've had all kinds of varying experiences with it, depending on which release and which base level, or which update; like Sabayon it seems to suffer from inconsistent quality.

Compare either of them to any Debian-based project (even the *buntu varieties, which are very easily installed, but in my opinion not up to the high quality of Debian project testing), and neither Sabayon nor Manjaro reach Ubuntu in quality and are not even close to what high quality Debian and Slackware projects produce.

So if you want something novel to experiment with, both Sabayon and Manjaro are quite interesting. At times they can work really well, and you may be fortunate to have good success with them for a year, six months, or three months, or you may run into difficulties sooner than that. I've had better results with Sabayon than with Manjaro myself, but the time it takes to update Sabayon is not worth the effort and it doesn't match Debian in quality. Manjaro promises a flexible Arch-like experience with a faster configuration of the initial system. It does that, but again lacks in consistent quality.

If you have time, both are interesting to use and test. For me, neither of them are suitable for a long term stable system, only good enough for a test system unless you have a great backup strategy and are willing to back out unsuccessful updates and update later once fixes are made, or participate in one of the teams to help improve the efforts - then they are fun and great projects to work with! :-)

Yeah, I've tried to use Manjaro before. I have NOT had good luck with it not destroying itself.

I haven't used Sabayon in YEARS. I was never a big fan of Gentoo due to the time it takes to update, and thus didn't like Sabayon either. That's really the main thing I have against it though, is that it takes so insanely long to do updates that I'm simply not willing to wait for it to update, and so it quickly gets outdated.

While we're mentioning "Manjaro", I'll also comment about a few other distributions with "M" as the first letter in the distribution name.

Manjaro has an appealing "idea" - to make a pretty easy, usable, functional version of Arch Linux. The idea is appealing, and when you first install it, the distribution initially looks good as well. On first examination, it appears to have most of the advantages of Arch - a clean, straightforward architecture with relatively simple command driven scripts to initialize only what you intend to use.

When you first start Manjaro - assuming the release you run loads and configures, it may start out well.

The problem emerges once you update the distribution a few times. Again, it seems positive - at first - it tends to be reasonably fast, and when it works, it works nicely. However, after a few updates - not just once, but several times on different distributions updated in the past two years, the package updates are flawed and end up breaking the distribution. I don't know the full extent to which the mechanisms can be tested or evaluated, but I've managed to break - to the point of making the networking unavailable, rendering the system unusable without a backup, replacement, or reinstallation.

Mageia, Mandriva, and OpenMandriva, (all three of which are descendants from the Mandrake --> Mandriva distributions, which date back to Mandrake, conceived in the late nineties by Gael Duval, have a similar fate when it comes to distributions and package quality. Too many times a network update of a system that otherwise appears fairly appealing results in a system that is unusable. I think somewhere around Mageia 4 or 5 was around the point that I decided to use my limited time and resources to using and testing other Linux distributions that have worked better for me and my specific interests (remember we're all different; some people may still prefer Manjaro, Mageia, or some other "favorite" distribution, and that's the great value of the numerous varieties and flavors of Linux distributions today).

Regarding Gentoo (and other distributions that are primarily "source based"): while these distributions, at some point, are valuable, and someone somewhere has to build applications and system components from their source code, I also find Gentoo, for my tastes, to be far too time consuming to build.

Sabayon, on the other hand, speeds up some of that. You can replace and rebuild any Sabayon package, driving all the way back to Gentoo sources (if you wish), but you can build a Sabayon binary code version quite easily that is a full-featured system. The mechanism to update packages is a bit slower than a Debian or Red Hat approach, but it can be done while you are doing other things, so it's a bit of a trade off. I think Sabayon also moved primarily to 64-bit systems. I stopped updating them a bit before getting my Dell Inspiron 5558, which is my first 64 bit home system (other than Digital Alpha workstations, which had 64 bit capabilities 20-25 years ago on Unix-based workstations). I've not tried a Sabayon update this year, turning back to Fedora and openSUSE recently, along with Linux Mint 17.3, antiX 15 and 16, MX-14 and MX-15, and Debian. All of these have worked really well for me in recent months.

tlmiller wrote:

Yeah, I've tried to use Manjaro before. I have NOT had good luck with it not destroying itself.

I haven't used Sabayon in YEARS. I was never a big fan of Gentoo due to the time it takes to update, and thus didn't like Sabayon either. That's really the main thing I have against it though, is that it takes so insanely long to do updates that I'm simply not willing to wait for it to update, and so it quickly gets outdated.

I have not used ANY of the "M" systems in recent months.Debian, antiX, MX-16, openSUSE, Fedora and PCLinuxOS are the systems that I have been using recently, plus Chromebook N22 and the Motorola Droid Turbo round out the network systems that I have been using.

One area where incremental updates could be suffering: No developer uses a stale release. Rolling releases are killing code for people who stay put, because the devs switch to supporting only the latest releases. Been told that a few times in other forums.

You are right on. Just got a new Manjaro 17.0.1 USB to see if I could do anything with it.Ran it live and it started up fine.After a few minutes of running live it told me that it had some important changes.I said go ahead.That's the last time it worked.

Not sure if I try it again on another day if the stick will work or if there will be other issues, but I am not particularly interested in debugging this software AGAIN.

I've had very little success. I think that 15.09 worked for me, perhaps for a few weeks before having a similar problem.

Years ago I may have taken this on as a challenge. Not any more. I get plenty of that in my paid job.

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